Enterprises and other organizations often have a diverse range of business needs, where one of the most important aspects of enterprise management is the sales and business development process. This often complex practice includes many tangible and intangible variables, ranging from competitive initiation of transactions to effective delivery of promises. Managing these variables is often disjointed, particularly for consultants, contractors, and/or employees that need to access specific data stored in multiple and disparate departments in order to respond to solicitations for products or services, generally referred to as a Request for Proposal. When entities solicit work through a Proposal, Request for Proposal, Request for Information, or Request for Quotes, a great deal of information may be requested. This information may include past performance, account and contract information, price quotes, corporate profiles, biographies, qualifications, financial data, third party recommendations, estimated completion dates, technical specifications, and proposed solution design, among many other things.
Managing a proposal lifecycle requires significant and diverse resources. An enterprise's “reach” may include operational aspects of developing a proposal solution, researching competitors, past account or relevant experience information, estimating costs, managing resources, and assembling documents into a packaged proposal, performing post-process review, among other things. Even after proposals are won or lost, enterprises may continue to be faced with significant information management needs and reporting, such as generating and executing contracts, deploying resources and personnel to fulfill the contract, interacting with vendors or sub-contractors, internal and external personnel review, contract management and fulfillment, process reviews, and/or developing timelines or milestones to ensure timely delivery, among other things.
Existing proposal management systems fail to provide solutions that manage all materials and information necessary for managing the full proposal lifecycle, let alone presenting the information to users in a useful, intuitive, and informative way. That is, existing systems take a divide-and-conquer approach, with distinct systems for managing proposals, contracts, personnel, scheduling, resumes, and day-to-day tasks. One drawback of these approaches is that each system usually includes a separate data store, resulting in unnecessary redundancy and data saturation, as well as scattering critical data throughout an organization. Even when disparate repositories can be integrated, such as using a data warehouse, existing systems are nonetheless unable to integrate all of an organization's repositories, particularly those residing on individual machines. This often results in competitive obstacles, such as competitor information being stored in private repositories, or bids or proposals being lost because data cannot be analyzed effectively. For example, without a unified data management solution, there is an inability to search all actual documents, descriptive information about materials may be unavailable. Instead, the organization must rely on manual processes, such as creating reports, developing scripts, or other processes that take a significant amount of time and resources. Moreover, the organization will not have the means to consistently update documents, control informational lifespan, or control the use of proposal information. This may lead to an organization being evaluated negatively because documents, resumes, personnel data, or other information is inaccurate or out-of-date, and proposal requirements are often difficult to correlate against products and services offered by an enterprise due to the lack of communication between systems.
Existing systems also suffer from drawbacks due to lack of prioritization and communication, as the existing systems have no mechanism for prioritizing or sharing information about the prioritized opportunities. This may result in imbalanced resource allocation, where low impact proposals are given significant attention while high impact opportunities languish. For example, an organization may win a large number of low impact proposals, yet these proposals may be less profitable or have less strategic impact for the organization. Moreover, the lack of visibility across groups and organizations, such as capture management, business development, proposal management, portfolio management, and/or operations prevents organizations from exploiting the benefits of collaboration. Without a simple and integrated display of the key performance indicators and metrics, teams cannot rally and work together successfully. Another problem of existing systems is maintenance and troubleshooting overhead, particularly when distinct suppliers or vendors supply the systems, introducing the need to contact third parties to utilize or maintain information. Yet another problem with existing systems is a lack of seamless communication and interaction, introducing problems in maintaining consistency or analyzing data to develop intelligent business strategies, among other problems.
These and other drawbacks are wide spread among existing systems.